Shadows of Berlin

16.

The Empty Canvas

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is still weeks away, but Christmas shoppers are starting to crowd the sidewalks and jam the trains. Women labor to manage packages. On the Eighth Avenue Local, Rachel gives up her spot to an overloaded middle-­aged lady, because men seldom surrender their seats unless the woman is pregnant or struggling with an infant. An armload of shopping bags from B. Altman’s, they seem to agree, she brought upon herself. Rachel stands staring at a poster of a well-­barbered husband embracing his smiling wife who sports a polka-­dot apron and holds a feather duster.

So the harder a wife works, the cuter she looks! the husband proclaims.

Growing up in Berlin, Rashka had compared all advertisements designed to attract women to her mother. How would that dress look on her eema? How would that perfume smell compared to the smell of oil paints? But in America, Rachel has often relied on advertisements to construct her own makeshift identity. Ads offer lessons on how to shop, how to behave, how to fit in, and she has tried to learn from them. She has tried! If she buys Heinz condensed cream of tomato soup, her husband won’t yawn over her cooking. Even a woman can open Alcoa Aluminum’s bottle caps—­without a knife blade, a bottle opener, or a husband! The most important quality in coffee is how much it will please your man.

Out of the subway, the sky is white above the city. The café radiators hiss with steam. She has finally tracked down her Feter Fritz. He is still dressed in his secondhand suit, but there is a certain zippiness about him. She notes that he acquired a bamboo cane as if he’d plucked it out from the past, when such a thing was required by every metropolitan gentleman. “How is your blintz?” he inquires, and Rachel realizes she is actually tasting the blintz delivered by Alf, their ancient waiter. Its sweetness.

“It’s good,” she is pleased to report, nodding. Her uncle has a gossipy tongue this morning. Artists he’s known and their fated decline from their zenith back in Berlin. Wolfgang Schnyder, Paul Genz, George Grosz. “Grosz left Germany to teach here in New York City at the Art Students League but now lives upstate. It seems he’s given up the old chaos of his canvases for the tranquility of Hudson River landscapes. But can one blame him? Who could maintain Dada for three decades and remain sane?”

But then Feter, as he inevitably does, gets down to business. “So, ziskeit,” he begins, smiling to himself. “I have something for you.”

She feels a perk of interest, foolishly, childishly. “Something?”

“Yes,” says her feter, removing a kraft-paper envelope from his jacket and placing it on the table beside her plate.

Rachel frowns at it, confused. Chews slowly and swallows. “What is this?”

“This is the money you paid to Mrs. Appelbaum for my rent,” he tell her brightly.

But Rachel still frowns.

“It’s what I owed you,” her uncle says. “For your kindness,” he must explain, his brightness dimming.

“But where did it come from?”

“Where does money usually come from?” A slightly insulted smile. “It came from hard work. Your feter is not a man without ingenuity, Rokhl. I don’t make a habit of living on other people’s charity. Go on,” he bids her gladly. “Take it.”

She lifts her eyebrows at the yellowed envelope. Taking money from Feter Fritz feels irregular. On the other hand? She can stop worrying about Aaron’s reaction if she can replace the rainy-­day twenty in the Merriam-­Webster before he notices it’s missing. She fingers the envelope. Thank God her husband has not been moved to solve a crossword puzzle lately.

“Have I said? I’m moving out of our old rat hole.”

Rachel looks up. “You call it a rat hole?”

“I call it what it is, zeisele. I’ve found, uh, a much more suitable place,” he decides to describe it, spooning the kasha into his mouth. He’s been to the barber, she notices. His fingernails have been groomed. “Nothing palatial, of course. A bachelor efficiency in a building on 42nd Street. And should I mention? It has a doorman.”

“So. You’re leaving the Lower East Side?”

Her feter raises his eyes from his bowl to give her a closer look. “That distresses you, Daughter?”

“No. It’s just that you’ve been there so long.”

Feter only shrugs, then frowns at the envelope, still in her hands. “Your blintz. Eat. You don’t want to offend Alf, do you?” Which means don’t insult me. Put the money in your pocket. Yet she leaves the envelope in its place on the table and takes a bite of the blintz.

Her feter holds his frown, but then, as if he has plucked a thought from a passing cloud, he wonders aloud, “When was the last time you held a paintbrush in your hand, Ruchel?”

The sweet taste in her mouth turns to mud. She shakes her head. “Feter.”

“Think of the art you once produced, Rokhl. Only a year ago, you had the beginnings of a career. People were taking an interest in your art. You were starting to sell. Have you forgotten?”

And now she feels the darkness up close. “I haven’t forgotten my own life, Feter,” she answers.

“Then what is it? Why have you stopped?”

“You know why.”

“Because of what happened. Such a small thing.”

“A night in Bellevue was not a small thing, Feter.”

“No? So you think what? That’s you’re crazy now, Daughter? Ha!” he laughs. “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but everyone is crazy. We have bombs that could burn continents into cinders. Who is not crazy?”

“That’s a different craziness.”

“Meshuga iz meshuga. How is it different?”

“It’s different,” she insists. “I shouldn’t have to explain.”

“You know, Rashka, sometimes I think,” her uncle tells her, “sometimes I think that you’d rather deny what happened. To us. To the Jews.”

Rachel glares, eyes like flint. “I don’t deny anything.”

“No?” he asks, raising the spoon to his mouth. “That’s good to hear. Because people should know. It’s important that people should know.”

“What people want to know is exactly nothing.”

“Then force them to know. Don’t be so courteous and give them the choice. Make them open their eyes. Teach the world with your paintbrush. All I’m telling you is this: You are gifted. But think how many gifted Jews,” he says, “are no longer with us.”

Rachel gazes back, her eyes gone wet.

“You think the world doesn’t care? Make it care. You think the world doesn’t remember? Make it remember. This what I’m telling you,” says Feter. “Put your gift to work.”

Rachel wipes at her eyes and retains her silence.

Feter leans farther forward, adding a confidential note to the urgency of his voice. “There’s a man. David Glass.”

The name casts her mind backward to Naomi’s photograph. Feter and the man Glass on the bench. The two conspirators at work in Tompkins Square Park. She has been waiting for her uncle to reveal himself. To reveal the fox’s scheme. And now that moment has come.

“You must know from him,” Feter tells her. “He a very influential art dealer.”

“Of course I know from him, Feter. Everyone knows from David Glass. Who doesn’t know?”

“Exactly. Who doesn’t?” her uncle agrees. Almost eagerly, he agrees, as if this is exactly what he wants to hear. “But what you may not know, Ruchel,” he is saying, “is that he is always on the hunt for talent. Like yours, my dear.”

Rachel frowns. Uncertain. “Oh, so you think so, do you, Feter?”

“After all,” he observes, “are you not the daughter of Lavinia Morgenstern-­Landau? So for the sake of her memory, I encourage you. Open up your paint box, set a canvas on an easel, and begin the great labor.”

Rachel does not smile. “Begin the labor. Open my paint box,” she says grimly. “I understand.” She nods darkly. “Eema is gone, so you want to take me to market as the calf of a prize cow.”

He is stung! “Rashka!”

“It’s true, isn’t it, Feter. S’iz ams!”

“No, it is untrue.” Her uncle is adamant. “Es iz nit ams. I’m thinking of you, Rokhl. Nor du!”

“Nor ich? Nor du, Feter! You’re thinking of yourself, as you always have. It makes me wonder what else you’re keeping hidden from view. Eema always said this too.”

At this, Feter becomes obviously angry. Not just at having his generosity rebuffed but now this insult from his sister. “Child, you have no idea what my bond with your mother was about. You knew her for no more than what? A few years past a decade? I, on the other hand, knew her since the day of my birth. We were often competitive, the two of us. That’s true. Highly so. We argued sometimes over means. But we always, always saw the world through the same eyes. So don’t you dare lecture me, Rokhl, about my sister. Everything I did was to protect her. To protect you. I can only grieve that she isn’t alive today to testify to this truth, but she is not.

“For her, in the end, I failed. But for you, Rokhl, the gem of her heart—­for you I have given everything I have. My sweat and blood and my soul. And this is how you respond to me? To so cruelly suspect my intentions? To spit on my sacrifices? I am struck. Cut to the bone, Ruchel.” His face is reddened, his eyes steaming darkly. He grinds his teeth and straightens his spine imperiously.

“So there is an envelope. Take it up or leave it behind, I don’t care which,” he tells her, flapping his coat over his shoulders. “It’ll be a welcome gratuity for Alf, I’m sure.” Standing, he slaps on his fedora at a rakish angle. “I think perhaps we should enjoy a bit of distance from one another for a time. And since I am such a disreputable character, I’m sure you won’t miss me.”

“I know there is something you are hiding from me, Feter!” she shouts out. “You who are stuffed with money.” These words she speaks with contempt. “It’s falling out of your pockets for your haircuts and manicures. For your steak dinners and your ridiculous cane! You think you are the sophisticate again, Feter?” Rachel is on her feet. “The cosmopolitan man? You are not. You are a relic. A fossil.”

Her uncle’s face has gone bloodless.

“You sold Eema’s painting, Feter! Somehow you laid your hands on it and sold it to David Glass for your own profit!” she shouts, her eyes a welter of tears. “And you think that now what? You can sell me next?”

“How dare you, child?” he wants to know. “How dare you think I’ve ever done anything but look after your welfare? I stayed alive in Auschwitz with the thought of you! Of you and your eema, that’s how I lived! So to hear you hurling such hurtful claims? It’s an insult to life!”

The ancient waiter has arrived, hoping to quell the commotion. “Say, folks. Can maybe we try to calm ourselves down a little?” he wonders. “People are trying to eat here.”

“Not to worry, Alf,” Feter assures the waiter with brisk righteousness. “I think we’ve said all there is to say,” he decrees. “You can give the check to my niece!” And then he is gone. Whirling out of the door, leaving a void of silence in the midst of the room.

She walks, crying. Walks aimlessly. She is so angry and so hurt and so frightened and so shamed. On the subway, she never imagined that she would be one of those women who cries alone in her seat, yet here she is. Returning home, she seizes the cat tearfully, but Kibbitz is in no mood for comfort, so she allows him to escape out the window.

By the time darkness rises, she has finally cried her eyes dry, lying on the bed, empty. Traffic noise filters dimly up from the street. She thinks of the painting. That it could be reduced to nothing more than “the nudie!” Seeing her mother’s canvas in such disreputable circumstances, on the counter of a shabby pawnbroker’s shop. A shame and a disgrace! It was nicked in spots. The paint scratched here and there. The colors dirtied by insensitive handling. Two decades of careless journeys had left their mark, but even beneath the thin coat of grime, the painting still projected fire.

The first time she saw it, even as a child, she was entranced by its bright beauty. Standing on her mother’s easel, the oils freshly gleaming, the painting glowed like rubies in the sunlight. She could not remove her eyes from it. Until she heard a voice.

Hallo, Bissel…

Berlin was a sunny city that day. Feter Fritz had promised Rashka an outing as a treat, but first they had to stop at the loft where Eema painted. Rashka was looking forward to the cakes at the Hotel Adlon afterward. The chocolate cream torte. But then Feter and Eema had set to arguing again, out in the hallway, having quickly forgotten Rashka’s presence. So she’d slipped into Eema’s studio. She liked the studio. The light that poured in through the glass ceiling. She liked the smell of the paints and bottles of oils. She liked the collection of brushes, flat, thick, long, and thin as needles, and would often pick them out of their jars to pretend to paint a picture on the air—­but only if Eema wasn’t there to catch her. Today, though, she was mostly hoping to cuddle with Gilgamesh, her eema’s fluffy, tawny-­furred studio cat.

The feline, however; had been abducted. There was a girl sitting on a stool. The same girl who had been lying in Feter’s bed. She was barely covered by a gauzy robe, this girl, and smoking a cigarette as Gilgamesh purred in her lap and she stroked the beast’s head. Rashka blinked. She felt paralyzed by the sight. This girl was as entrancing as her eema’s painting. Red hair turned fiery under the sun that beamed down on her from the skylit windows above. Her beauty made Rashka feel the same way she did when she watched Eema comb her glossy black hair in the gilded mirror. Both filled and emptied. It was a face that called for the most beautiful of descriptions. She was azoy sheyn vi di zibn veltn. Beautiful even as the seven worlds.

“Hallo, Bissel. Shall I call you that? Little morsel? You look like you could be gobbled up in a single bite.” There was a teasing quality to the girl’s voice, but Rashka felt a pinch of fear. That she might be swallowed in a single bite? But before such a thing happened, in came Eema, her voice still heated by her dispute with Feter Fritz. “Rashka! Come!” her mother demanded. “Time for you to go. Your feter’s taking you to the Adlon to rot your teeth!”

“But I wanted to pet Gilgamesh,” Rashka complained, trying to gain time, trying to maintain herself in the girl’s presence a little longer. Just a little longer.

Eema, though, was not having it. She snatched Rashka’s hand and gave it a yank. “Come, I said!”

Rashka had no other choice but to obey. She glanced backward as Eema hauled her out of the studio. The girl, she saw, had returned to petting the cat as if Rashka had never existed.

***

The subway is packed. Rachel ignores the bumps and gropes of the crowd. Switching to the uptown I.R.T., she hops off at Columbus Circle, breathing in the open air, and walks down to West 57th, where she finds Lee’s Art Shop waiting for her.

Stretched canvases are neatly stacked by size in large sets or wooden racks. She slides out a 24 x 36-­inch. Considers it with a frown. Slides it back in. Slides out a 36 x 48 instead. She needs the space. A great breadth of clean, unpainted canvas.

Returning on the Broadway Express, she stands with the large canvas wrapped in paper in front of her. But it is so big that it’s hard not to keep bumping the knees of the other passengers, who shoot her irritated looks. She pretends to see none of them and instead focuses on the advertisement of a contented husband holding a steaming coffee cup.

Now, even a man can make perfect coffee in just seconds!

Back at the apartment, she has placed the canvas on a chair stolen from the kitchen table so she can stare at its white emptiness from the sofa. It stares back at her with a vacant canvas face. A key turns in a lock. The apartment door opens without further warning, and Aaron steps in, his Alpiner shoved back on his head and his coat flopped over his arm.

“Halloo. Guess who’s home early?” he calls.

She is caught out—­her private exchange with this canvas interrupted by the intrusion—­but what can she do? “The king of the castle?” she guesses.

“None other,” he concedes and thusly bestows a hello kiss on her cheek before he stands back and surveys this new unexpected wrinkle. “So what’s this?” he wonders.

With Aaron home, it turns out that two’s company but three’s a crowd, especially if the three includes an empty canvas as tall as the coffee table is long.

“So you’re painting again? Is that it?”

“Is what it?”

“This gigantic thing on the kitchen chair.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What gigantic thing?”

“H’okay. I surrender.”

She feels exposed, vulnerable, naked in her desires. Here is a husband from Flatbush chomping on the corned beef sandwich he’s brought home from some stupid deli, wiping his greasy fingers and mouth with a paper napkin, when all she wants to do is sit with her canvas. And his tone confirms just how betrayed he still feels. By her. By her Episode. How suspicious he is of any uncertain development now. Once, he was happy to see her painting. And if he wasn’t happy, at least he wasn’t watching her like she was a bomb with a lit fuse. As if any deviation from normal was a threat. The anger settles in between them, her anger, his anger. And finally some comment he makes strikes Rachel wrong, or maybe it’s when he does that awful imitation of the woman on the subway making her sound like a nitwit, because doesn’t he really think all women are nitwits? Suddenly they are shouting.

In the morning, she remembers throwing her glass of Gomberg Seltzer at the floor.

Pulling herself from bed, she finds it cleaned up. She finds her husband sitting at the kitchen table in his shirtsleeves and with his necktie loose at his open collar. Smoking over a cup of coffee with sleepless, burdened eyes. The cat goes prancing before her as she enters, but Aaron ignores him, looking up at Rachel.

“Good morning,” he says blankly.

She is dressed in her pj’s as she pads in sock feet over to the stove and ignites the burner under the kettle with a match. “You made yourself coffee,” she observes.

“Just that instant stuff,” Aaron says. No big deal.

Now, even a man can make perfect coffee in just seconds!

Rachel feeds the mewing cat, Little Friskies poured into his bowl. She sets it down, then fills up a bowl for the cat’s water from the tap. Sets it down as all the while, she can feel Aaron watching her from his chair. Feels his eyes follow her as she passes him again and crosses to the sofa where she picks up the pillow and wrinkled sheet upon which her husband slept.

“You cleaned up the broken glass,” she says without making eye contact.

“How many years in the restaurant business?” She can hear the shrug in his voice. “You think I’ve never picked up after somebody makes a mess?”

“I’m sorry,” she offers, concentrating on shaking the pillow from its case. “I’m sorry you had to sleep on the sofa.”

“It wasn’t too bad. Better than the army.”

Rachel stops. Hugs the pillow against herself. Gazes back at her husband with large eyes. “I know I’m a terrible wife.”

“Oh. You’re not so bad,” Aaron tells her, exhaling a breath. Then he checks his wristwatch. Stubs out his cigarette. Standing, he leaves his coffee cup behind. “I gotta go.”

“You’re opening today?”

He sighs, slipping on his suit jacket. “Opening and closing. So God knows, as usual, when I’ll be home.” He crosses the room, stopping to give his wife a soft kiss on the cheek, which she absorbs in silence. “Look, I get it. Being artistic? Not so easy. I shoulda been more—­I dunno—­more something when I saw you’d brought this thing home,” he says, measuring the immensity of the canvas by wagging his hand up and down like an elevator gone crazy. He crosses behind her, removes his hat and coat from the hall tree. “So paint, why don’t you?” he suggests. “Who knows? It could be fun.”

Rachel lifts her eyes to the canvas still on the chair in front of the sofa. In another minute, the door to the hallway opens and shuts, leaving Rachel staring at the blank expanse of unpainted universe. The fear is so crippling. If she dares to pick up a brush and touch it to her palette, is she willing to risk her sanity? Her soul? Is there another straitjacket waiting for her the moment she releases the madness in her onto the canvas?

In Washington Square, people are strolling under the arch, milling about pavement under the bright-­white sun. It’s breezy, hold-­on-to-­your-­hat weather. The fountain’s been shut down since the end of summer, but there’s a klatch of beatnik kids perched around the basin, one curly-­headed boy strumming on his guitar, though his singing is caught by the wind and blown away.

“Are you sure we won’t get arrested?” Rachel asks.

Naomi is beside her on one of the green park benches, lighting up a juju. “For what? This is the Village. Everything’s legal.” She draws in a hit and hands it over to Rachel. Was it really so very long ago in her life when a Jew sitting on a public bench was committing a criminal offense? Yellow benches only for Jews in Berlin! Nur für Juden! And now here she is on a regular bench, breaking the law by choice! C’est étonnant! Carefully she draws in the smoke, but then coughs it back up harshly. Her face goes flush.

“Sorry.” Naomi half grins. “I should have warned you it’s strong as fuck.” Naomi retrieves the juju for another drag. Holding it in, she speaks in a stifled voice. “It grows freely.” She releases the breath with only a light waft of smoke. “Freely as weeds. Right here in the city in vacant lots and shit. You can pick it like dandelions if you know what to look for.”

“Is that what you did?”

Naomi laughs. “Nah. This I bought,” she says. “This stuff is Mexican. Much more heavy duty that what you had last time. There’s a guy who’s good for it in my building. But really, these days? You can buy it pretty much anywhere around here. There’s probably half a dozen guys selling it right here in the Square.” She offers to share again, and Rachel accepts. Draws in smoke and holds it until she can’t any longer. But this time, the cough is easier to manage.

“So. You had a row again?” Naomi asks. “You and the shtoomer?”

Rachel is wiping her eyes. “It wasn’t really”—­she huffs out a breath—­“really a row.” Shakes her head and hands back the juju. “I don’t know what it was,” she confesses.

“Not a row, but he’s sleeping on the couch.”

“He was last night. Tonight, I’m not sure. He usually does his double shift on Wednesday, so I’m already asleep by the time he gets home.”

“Just like Pop, the poor dope,” Naomi laments, but without much sympathy. “Slaving away for the sake of a buck.”

Almost in a whisper, Rachel asks the question. “Do you think I’m wrong?”

“Wrong?”

“Is it so unreasonable for a man to want children from his wife?”

Naomi pulls a face over that one. “Is that what this is about?”

Rachel shrugs like a child.

“Well. Who the fuck knows what’s ‘reasonable’?” Naomi decides. “It means shit. Nothing’s ‘reasonable.’”

“But isn’t it,” Rachel says, “isn’t it part of the deal? When people marry. Isn’t it part of the contract?”

Naomi shakes this off. Contract schmontract. “It’s not like you signed an agreement to pump out a bunch of brats by a certain date,” Naomi tells her. She takes another draw, holds it, then releases it. “And it’s not like he’s gonna carry a kid in his belly for nine months. It’s your body, not his. You should decide.” And then she asks, “So you want another toke?”

“Toke?”

“Another drag?” says Naomi.

Rachel breathes in but takes the offered toke, drawing in deeply, tasting the sour smoke as she accepts it into her body. Holding, then exhaling. Her head lightens. Her body lightens. Different from the Miltown. Miltown is pedestrian. A mood dampener. This feels as if part of her brain is unmoored and on its own course.

Naomi drops back her head, eyes closed, to soak up the chilly sunlight. “God, I love sunshine,” she declares with a sweet tranquility. And then? Still with her eyes closed to the sunlight, “Can I ask you a question? I mean, it’s kind of a personal thing.”

This should have warned Rachel off, but maybe with the juju, her guard is down. “Sure,” she replies. Honestly, she thinks it’s going to be a question about Aaron or maybe about some sisterly element of feminine biology. Menstrual cycles or tampons. A personal question.

But what Naomi asks her is “Why did you stop painting?”

“Why did I stop?” Perhaps, if she repeats the question aloud, she can stall for time. Because she’s afraid that if she’s not careful, she might actually give a truthful answer. Naomi is unaware of details of the Episode. Aaron passed it off to his family as an anemic attack. Iron-­poor blood. Maybe Naomi believes this and maybe she doesn’t, but either way, it was a lie that Rachel has maintained, even though it has created a gap between Naomi and her. A small unspoken thing as painfully annoying as a pebble in a shoe.

“You were so good,” her sister-­in-­law assures her. “Those ghosts or spirits or whatever. They were scary in a way,” she says, “but really moving too. And then you just stopped.”

“I was sick,” Rachel answers.

“Yeah. I know. The anemia thing. But you didn’t go back. So I’ve always kinda wondered why.”

Rachel has to suddenly concentrate on keeping herself in check. No tears. No tears.

“I’m sorry,” Naomi offers. “I’m upsetting you.” She can see that. “Never mind. Forget I asked.”

“I stopped,” Rachel declares. “Because I was afraid to continue,” she confesses. “I was afraid that if I continued? Something terrible would come out of me. Something,” she says, “unforgivable.”

Night. Alone in the bed. The racket of the elevated West Side freight passes, rattling the bedroom’s window glass. Rachel absorbs the blunt thunder of the tracks completely. Then speaks quietly to the air. “Tell me the story again, Eema.”

The mattress creaks softly.

Which story?

“The story of the drowned kittens.”

Eema is a silhouette, shrouded by the room’s darkness, but she has brought the perfume of the Krematorium to her daughter’s bedroom. Ah. Well. My mother. Your grandmother of blessed memory. You never knew her, I know. But she taught me a lesson when I was very small, which I would never forget.

Rachel smokes in silence, her eyes gleaming with the ruby ember of her cigarette.

A terrible thing had happened, her eema tells her. A frightening thing. I had seen a man drown a bag full of kittens by dropping them over the side of the Weidendammer Brücke. I could hear them, their panicky little meows from inside his burlap sack. And when he tossed them over into the river, he listened for a moment for the sound of the splash. When he heard it, he simply walked off as if he had done nothing. As if he was an innocent man.

I was so—­so shocked. So overwhelmed that I lost my voice. It’s true, she says. Your eema didn’t speak for days. I was so utterly racked by guilt. Guilt that I should have stopped him, this criminal. That somehow, I should have rescued those little kittens from their fate. And I felt the remorse of the world on my heart like a heavy stone, she says. Until my mother came into my bedroom one night, just like this, while I was lying in the dark. And she said to me, “Vina. You cannot rescue what cannot be rescued. You cannot save what cannot be saved.”

A beat.

Laughter floats up from the street. Rachel’s eyes are chilled by tears. “And me,” she asks quietly. “What about your little goat, Eema? Can I be rescued still?”

A police siren whines sharply past, and a sudden red light invades the room from the window, exposing her eema as she must have looked on the day of her final Selektion before the ovens took her. A corpse stripped naked, skeletal, her hair nothing but a wiry scrub. Eyes bottomless. Arm imprinted with her number. Rescued? Only by your own hands, she says.

The siren and flashing red fade, but as the room passes back into darkness, Rachel is alone. Until she hears the front door opening, then closing. A beat of silence is followed by the noise of Aaron clearing his throat. A gleam of light as a floor lamp in the living room is switched on. “Aaron?” she calls out to him.

The lamplight invades as he opens the bedroom door and enters in his shirtsleeves, sitting on the edge of their bed with a chirrup of springs. He loosens his necktie with a hook of two fingers. When he speaks, he sounds utterly spent. “You know, I think you’re right. I don’t understand. I really don’t.” He pauses. The glow from the living room lamp paints his eyes. “I don’t understand what those people did. To you,” he says. “To your family. I try, I honestly do. I watched the newsreels when I was still in the army. Battalion ran screenings. A.P.S. footage from, ya’ know, from liberated camps. There were grown men who couldn’t stand it. Some were vomiting. Sick with sobbing. Soldiers doing this, you understand,” he stresses. “Trained men. Some of these guys had seen combat, yet they just couldn’t stomach what they were seeing on the screen. But me? I stayed. I watched them all. I had no choice. As a Jew, I felt I couldn’t just look away. But then whattaya do? What’s a person supposed to do after seeing all that?” he asks.

“To me, I guess, there was only one answer. It seemed so simple really. Hitler murdered six million Jews? So we make more. Shouldn’t that be what we’re doing? I mean, shouldn’t that be our job?” he asks his wife but does not appear to expect a reply. “I keep thinking: It’s just her fear. Just her fear, and all I gotta do is be patient. But down deep, I have to admit that—­to me—­Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz? They’re all just words. Just the names of places that might as well be on the moon. Maybe I saw the newsreels, but I have no idea, not the slightest actual idea, what they really mean to you.”

His words drift away.

Rachel wipes tears from her face. “It’s not your fault,” she tells him.

Aaron expels a sigh. Rachel sits up to guide them both back down to the bed, where they spoon together, Aaron still dressed and in his shoes.

But when she closes her eyes, feeling him nuzzling into the back of her neck, all she sees is a gust of blinding snow, obscuring the outline of the white mountain that is rising to meet her.